From a recent review by John Hyman: "On the whole, the relationship between the philosophy of art and cognitive science is not in particularly good shape. Most cognitive scientists interested in the visual arts have a very sketchy knowledge of philosophy in general and of the philosophy of art in particular; and some of the most widely-read among them -- Zeki and Ramachandran, for example -- know surprisingly little about art. (See Hyman 2010.) For their part, many philosophers are uncritical of ideas in cognitive science that seem to confirm their prior commitments or intuitions, and their assessment of competing ideas in the field tends to be superficial and unsystematic, if it happens at all...But the material that refers to cognitive science isn't the highlight of the collection. To some extent this reflects a tendency among philosophers to equate respect for science with deference to recent scientific ideas, however speculative and however coloured with philosophical ideas they would dismiss as muddled or jejune if they came across them in their colleagues' work. But it also reflects the absence of a properly thought-out view of the relationship between science and philosophy in general. This is something philosophers interested in depiction need as much as philosophers of physics and philosophers of mind, because of the extensive scientific literature about the perception of pictures. But there is little evidence of it in the philosophical literature about pictorial art."
I am not convinced there is a ""properly thought-out view of the relationship between science and philosophy in general" in philosophy of mind and philosophy of physics (although my work on Newton's Challenge is meant to supply the latter!)
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